Gaming inspiration

Another phenomenal action scene in ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ is the one-shot, top-down battle sequence in a Parisian house.

While not a big gamer himself, Chad Stahelski had been inspired by the 2019 video game ‘The Hong Kong Massacre’, with both the top-down perspective and the dragon’s breath shotgun wielded by Wick both being pulled from the title.

The director said: “I knew I wanted to do a top shot. I’m not a big oner guy - I don’t really believe in that so much, unless there’s something to offer, if you can see things from a different perspective.

“We did some testing; I wanted to do all the muzzle flashes on a vertical plane, so it felt different. I was going down the rabbit hole of trying to find references, so I [went online to] type in, like, ‘aerial shots’, ‘top shots’, just to see what everybody else’s were like. At the top was Steven Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’.

“So I tried ‘video games top shot’, and way down at the bottom was ‘Hong Kong Massacre’. And I [looked at gameplay footage] and liked the way they did it.

“They did a lot more speed ramping, which I thought was really cool. I loved it for that. It’s just, when you’re dealing with a two-and-a-half-hour movie already, I had to be careful where I did my slow motions.”